A Struggle For Life | Page 4

from him as he rose to his feet and stretched
out his hands in the darkness; but his mind was too healthy and
practical to indulge long in such speculations.
Philip, being a smoker, chanced to have in his pocket a box of
allumettes. After several ineffectual essays, he succeeded in igniting
one against the dank wall, and by its momentary glare perceived that
the candle had been left in the tomb. This would serve him in
examining the fastenings of the vault. If he could force the inner door
by any means, and reach the grating, of which he had an indistinct
recollection, he might hope to make himself heard. But the oaken door
was immovable, as solid as the wall itself, into which it fitted air-tight.
Even if he had had the requisite tools, there were no fastenings to be
removed; the hinges were set on the outside.
Having ascertained this, Philip replaced the candle on the floor, and
leaned against the wall thoughtfully, watching the blue fan of flame
that wavered to and fro, threatening to detach itself from the wick. "At
all events," he thought, "the place is ventilated." Suddenly he sprang
forward and extinguished the light.
His existence depended on that candle! He had read somewhere, in
some account of shipwreck, how the survivors had lived for days upon
a few candles which one of the passengers had insanely thrown into the
long-boat. And here he had been burning away his very life!
By the transient illumination of one of the tapers, he looked at his
watch. It had stopped at eleven--but eleven that day, or the preceding
night? The funeral, he knew, had left the church at ten. How many
hours had passed since then? Of what duration had been his swoon?
Alas! it was no longer possible for him to measure those hours which
crawl like snails by the wretched, and fly like swallows over the happy.

He picked up the candle, and seated himself on the stone steps. He was
a sanguine man, but, as he weighed the chances of escape, the prospect
appalled him. Of course he would be missed. His disappearance under
the circumstances would surely alarm his friends; they would institute a
search for him; but who would think of searching for a live man in the
cemetery of Montmartre? The préfet of police would set a hundred
intelligences at work to find him; the Seine might be dragged, les
misérables turned over at the Morgue; a minute description of him
would be in every detective's pocket; and he--in M. Dorine's family
tomb!
Yet, on the other hand, it was here, he was last seen; from this point a
keen detective would naturally work up the case. Then might not the
undertaker return for the candlestick, probably not left by design? Or,
again, might not M. Dorine send fresh wreaths of flowers, to take the
place of those which now diffused a pungent, aromatic odor throughout
the chamber? Ah! what unlikely chances! But if one of these things did
not happen speedily, it had better never happen. How long could he
keep life in himself?
With his pocket-knife Wentworth cut the half-burned candle into four
equal parts. "To-night," he meditated, "I will eat the first of these pieces;
to-morrow, the second; to-morrow evening, the third; the next day, the
fourth; and then--then I 'll wait!"
He had taken no breakfast that morning, unless a cup of coffee can be
called a breakfast. He had never been very hungry before. He was
ravenously hungry now. But he postponed the meal as long as
practicable. It must have been near midnight, according to his
calculation, when he determined to try the first of his four singular
repasts. The bit of white-wax was tasteless; but it served its purpose.
His appetite for the time appeased, he found a new discomfort. The
humidity of the walls, and the wind that crept through the unseen
ventilator, chilled him to the bone. To keep walking was his only
resource.
A kind of drowsiness, too, occasionally came over him. It took all his

will to fight it off. To sleep, he felt, was to die, and he had made up his
mind to live.
The strangest fancies flitted through his head as he groped up and down
the stone floor of the dungeon, feeling his way along the wall to avoid
the sepulchres. Voices that had long been silent spoke words that had
long been forgotten; faces he had known in childhood grew palpable
against the dark. His whole life in detail was unrolled before him like a
panorama; the changes of a year, with its burden of love and death, its
sweets and its bitternesses, were epitomized in a single second. The
desire to sleep had left